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Writtings by Peter Porco
The Demise of buzzoplex.net
We think the world might not afford
a mistake -- the cramp in thought
that would sever the link found widely --
like here in a cafe on Main Street --
Black Sheep Deli in Amherst -- I sit and find --
new life in a Buzz-o-plex site
rising from the oversight, his failure to
see the thirst, the shocking get-and-grab
in some other lover of a buzz who entered
the one low, quick window to snatch --
there from under his chin, while
puppets brayed and friends drank beer --
and the old site went hither before Buzz
could tap out his keys and renew his lease --
snatched dot-com, shocking
puppetry of a different order--
No loss in the aggregate --
Here I sit in a Cafe on Main Street mere acres
from Emily's homestead, a street once owned
by Dickinson lawyers and town fathers
who overlooked miracles written by their white-dreamed
daughter in a slow room -- one thousand eight hundred
miracles -- they take flight after her death.
That overlooking -- whose mistake?
No loss in the particulars there.
Iced tea in hand, Internet Black Sheep,
I connect with dot-net
and feel the Buzz across the years and the miles.
Something Buzz-o-Complex made simple.
Saloon Outlook
When she walked in with him, I remembered
how fine the slope of her back, warm the cup
of her breast. My boot bashed the old oak bar,
and I thought, Hell, look what’s in my hand now.
He’s got her, and for me this long bottle,
neck sloping to a voluptuous chill,
a cool IPA rapture on my lips,
hops with a bite like those I’d greet her hips
with. She pulled up on the stool to my side,
her ankles laced in longing, with a smile
breaking my way, eyes of easy fire,
’til his deft touch on her chin swiveled her
his way. Hell. This IPA and I? Why
we’re soaked in friendship deep enough for love.
DANNY and SUSIE
The following is an operatic verse rendition of the tale of Orpheus & Eurydice. It should be sung to Puccini and filmed by Fellini.
Those wise enough to know say it’s true, after all:
There is no dying of the light
at first.
Instead, the head remains alive
for perhaps 30 seconds after
the angry blade cuts through the neck’s bundle
of muscle, bone and sinew.
The short unhappy life of the beheaded begins
with unbearable light and an understanding
keener than regret.
So Danny, who lost his head for love, saw
that half-minute of tumbling light,
the dizzying sky, the rolling dreams,
the river passing,
the bank where he once chewed leaves and bark
into poetry
passing, the memories of grief
passing ...
He is with her again now,
alone in the sedges on the bank
where their families once gathered goose eggs
and he would watch her dress billow
as she bent to the grass.
Susie moved like the river.
She was the river,
cool in the heat, with a strong pulling down,
the undertow beneath him,
like the dream that led him to her,
Danny’s girl, down in the grass.
She too was pulled down,
to follow his poems
and his songs of the sedges
where the birds lay their eggs.
How she wanted to sing like him
so the world would lay still before her
as it always seemed to grow quiet for him.
She listened but heard only
her need for a silence
she was sure was everywhere but within her.
To the sky, she flung her syllables and songs
and they took wing in strange fearful patterns
like the panic before a storm.
Susie’s mind had become a cage
where dark birds flap furiously
and peck each other’s wounds.
And her poems like fledglings
strained with the weight of their belief.
So Susie who wanted to fly
flayed herself with a vision of herself
as her first bird lying skinned
in the grass.
Danny, who lost his head for love, saw
the dizzying sky, the tumbling birds,
the river passing.
He is with her again,
calm like tall grass in the afternoon sun
and losing her, watching them come for her,
the ones who pick bones white.
There are those for whom doubts are an illness,
who have solutions like refrigerated smiles.
They welcomed Susie, the chance to improve her
and remove her from the circus of despair.
“Child,” they said to her. “You think about yourself
too much. Entirely too much thinking of yourself.
A big shoreless world lies under the sky.
Change your outlook.
Look out of your self.”
Away they took her, their keys rattling
on their belts.
Susie had fallen like a chick from her nest
and lay broken.
The fierce gleam in her eyes grew grey, hooded,
no more radiant than her family’s old wharf.
The doctors unpacked her bags. So beautiful, so talented,
they said, chaining her to the bed.
Danny rushed to her at night.
His music like a bloodshot scream
sliced through steel doors and barred windows,
silenced the rabid guard dogs and brought the brown bats
out of their closets
to hang in a stupor from the catheters,
the ceiling pipes and the medicine cabinets.
A doctor wheeled up to him like a Strangelove
of the Underworld, credentialed uniform,
a credit to his country. The man was
charmed, softened by the power of Danny’s song.
“I want her back,” Danny said. “She belongs here
only if all the world, and this place too, is unjust.”
The doctor mused and said,
“But it is unjust to put her in a world
where she does not know herself.
Her speech tries to rise like song
but is swallowed like pebbles.”
Danny tuned his voice and said,
“She toys with words as I do. She
utters song as I do. We bring forth
a future you cannot yet imagine.”
“Yes,” the doctor said. “You’re both going
down to the bottom of the river;
but you are diving and she is falling.***
So take her back, but don’t speak to her
until she can hold herself afloat,
or she will drown
and never again hear you.”
Danny, who lost his head for love, saw
the drowned birds in the river
passing, the memories of grief
passing ...
He is with her again standing in the ragged light
of the ward, staring with her out the window,
the bars shadowed on her face like heroin.
He turns to her, his hand floats up to her face,
his mouth opens, but closes again.
How is it that his music, which can quiet
the ocean and soothe the sky
not wake her? He tries again, saying:
“We all come to hate ourselves in time,
but you can get fixed that way, you know.
Don’t let them dry you out.”
The sound of his voice
comes to her like blank paper
drifting down an airshaft.
The touch of his hand on her shoulder
brings all the cold caress of kelp.
His face before hers recedes
like a stillborn dream. All is black-white, white-black,
and don’t expect her back before dinner.
The ward boys are quickly on him.
“Stop up his plumbing,” they say.
“Break his strings, torque his voicebox,
make him cough up bloody sentences.”
Danny flings manic words and songs of hallucination
against the windows and through the halls.
All the overnotes locked within the walls,
inside the cabinets and under the beds
crack open like eggs and hum with crazed music.
His poems kick teeth loose in the mouths
of Susie’s doctors. They seep
into the catheters like truth dope
until all the insane freaks break their chains,
wrap them around their furrowed hands
like rosary beads and
fist-fuck the priests.
Again he’s passing, the river passing,
his shadow like liquid grief along the bank.
In the sunlight of the next bend, he sees
the shadow sitting against a tree
singing, crying out for her
in a green and purple voice.
All that answers are three cellophane witches,
three white-caked women in black,
who come to Danny angered by his grief
and because, they say, he turned the arc
of Susie’s flight into the ground.
“So unbecoming a man to grieve at such length,”
the first cries in fury, digging her boots
into Danny’s eyes, lifting knee to groin
with fat, armored thighs.
The second woman, wearing a shawl of rage,
strikes him with a cudgel. “So self-involved!
Other women could have made you forget her,
darling!” she sneers, battering his gonads.
The last, swinging her great ax, sprays her fury
at him, so he will pay for Susie’s underground passage
through the slovenly house of the over-doubtful mind.
Her blade slices quick and clean through Danny’s neck
into the bark and wood
where he sits against the heavy tree.
Off his head rolls and on it rolls
to the edge of the bank, looking back at the revolving
sky and the three white-caked faces blurring
like clowns laughing in their own puke.
“I loved her,” the head says as it falls into the river.
And singing still, it flows on.
“I loved her. She didn’t listen to me.”
*** These words or something very like them were spoken by the Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung to the Irish writer James Joyce when Joyce speculated that his daughter, who was later diagnosed as schizophrenic, seemed to be doing only what Joyce himself was doing in his work, punning and other kinds of word play.
